SIDNEY — Residents of Sidney gathered at Julia Lamb park on Monday afternoon to view the total solar eclipse, only to be turned away by rain just before it reached totality.
Shelby County’s Amos Memorial Library hosted an eclipse viewing party at 1:45 p.m. on Monday, and dozens of residents gathered to find eclipse glasses and camaraderie while viewing, but a brief rain shower and clouds obscured the sun from view.
“There’s a lot more people into than what (my husband and I) thought there would be,” Debbie Greschan said. “People are travelling places and booking hotels, just to be closer and see more of it. We figured we’d see what we could here without travelling.”
While the sun was still visible, residents expressed their excitement for the event.
“I came straight from work,” said Gretchen Smith. “I am very excited about it, it’s once in a lifetime.”
Supplies were limited, but the library provided glasses, eclipse-themed snacks and eclipse-themed crafts for those who showed up.
“We only had 98 pairs of glasses to pass out today, but we passed out a hundred last week at the library,” Rikki Unterbrink, Youth Services director at Amos Memorial Library said. “It’s a much bigger turnout than I expected. I knew Sidney City Schools were in school today, so I was expecting to mostly see adults. We’ve been getting probably about 100 phone calls a day at the library about where to get glasses at.”
Melissa Arcikauskas brought her two children out to see the event, and thought it was a great learning experience.
“I brought the kids out because I thought it would be a really good opportunity for them to see something amazing,” she said. “It’s not something you see every day.”
Sidney Daily News Local Life editor Patricia Ann Speelman was in Nashville for the total eclipse.
“We heard about it, we read about it, we thought about it, and we thought we would know what it was like,” she said. “But it was so much better.”
Speelman watched the entire eclipse in 92 degree heat, and said the temperature dropped significantly during totality, and the darkness was only really experienced during totality.
“When you’re watching it, the moon is slowly moving across the sun, and it covers the sun, and then it moves past,” she said. “There is a tiny little sliver of sun visible through the glasses, but it’s there. Without glasses, it was bright sunlight.”
The next total solar eclipse will occur in 2024 and is expected to directly cross Ohio, from Cincinnati to Cleveland.
“Everybody was pinning the boxes and how you could make them into viewers, so we were going to do that if we couldn’t come out and see it,” Arcikauskas said. “I think this is a great opportunity that the library put together for everybody to come together. The kids are learning through crafts and enjoying the snacks and the company.”
Nationally, astronomers were giddy with excitement. A solar eclipse is considered one of the grandest of cosmic spectacles.
NASA solar physicist Alex Young said the last time earthlings had a connection like this to the heavens was during man’s first flight to the moon, on Apollo 8 in 1968. The first, famous Earthrise photo came from that mission and, like this eclipse, showed us “we are part of something bigger.”
NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, watched with delight from a plane flying over the Oregon coast and joked about the NASA official next to him: “I’m about to fight this man for a window seat.”
Hoping to learn more about the sun’s composition and activity, NASA and other scientists watched and analyzed from telescopes on the ground and in orbit, the International Space Station, airplanes and scores of high-altitude balloons beaming back live video.
Citizen scientists monitored animal and plant behavior as day turned into twilight. Thousands of people streamed into the Nashville Zoo just to watch the animals’ reaction and noticed how they got noisier at it got darker.
The Earth, moon and sun line up perfectly every one to three years, briefly turning day into night for a sliver of the planet. But these sights normally are in no man’s land, like the vast Pacific or Earth’s poles. This is the first eclipse of the social media era to pass through such a heavily populated area.
The moon hasn’t thrown this much shade at the U.S. since 1918, during the nation’s last coast-to-coast total eclipse. The last total solar eclipse on the U.S. was in 1979, but only five states in the Northwest experienced total darkness.
The path of totality passed through 14 states, entering near Lincoln City, Oregon, at 1:16 p.m. EDT, moving over Casper, Wyoming; Carbondale, Illinois; and Nashville, Tennessee, and then exiting near Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:47 p.m. EDT.
Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois saw the longest stretch of darkness: 2 minutes and 44 seconds.
Kim Kniseley drove overnight from Roanoke, Virginia, arriving in Madisonville, Tennessee, before dawn to get a parking spot at Kefauver Park, where by sunrise dozens of folks had claimed benches and set up tents.
He said he could have stayed home in Roanoke and seen a partial eclipse of 90 percent, but that would have been like “going to a rock concert and you’re standing in the parking lot.”
NASA reported 4.4 million people were watching its TV coverage midway through the eclipse, the biggest livestream event in the space agency’s history.
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